Improvisation’s Invisible Design: On Not Swallowing Chaos Whole
I count 99% Invisible among my favorite podcasts. Sold with his warm, infectious voice, Roman Mars’s central idea, summed up recently in the “Brilliantly Boring” episode, is that “a hallmark of great design is that you don't notice it.” I think the same can be said of improvisation’s often exquisite formal dance. Improvisers claim loudly that they are just making things up, chaotically going in many directions. A closer look, however, shows that amidst the chaos, formal design emerges.
The “Brilliantly Boring” episode offers the origin story of 99% Invisible’s odd title. When he was an on-air radio host, Mars was approached by the American Institute of Architects to do “a series of short one-to-two-minute [radio] stories about local architecture,” Mars urged a more expansive time slot, not 2 minutes but 4:30. He also wanted to explore “all kinds of urban design, not just buildings.”
The podcast title emerged from the first page of Bruce Mau’s Massive Change where Mars read, “For most of us, design is invisible, until it fails.”
That gave Mars half his title. The other half came from the great American architect Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome who sought “to comprehend the total integrating significance of the 99% invisible activity, which is coalescing to reshape our future.”
The title coalesced, 99% Invisible was on its way.
Rather than 2 or 4 minutes, the episodes now often top off at an hour, and cover everything from manhole covers in Osaka to a multi-episode exploration of The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s masterpiece on Robert Moses, the urban designer from hell.
Improv’s Invisible Formal Perfection
The relation of both parts of “99% Invisible” to improvisation is suggested, if subtly, by the title of my first book on improvisation, A Taste for Chaos: The Art of Literary Improvisation. It was a study of improv since antiquity and made the case for improv’s role in the formation of the Western Canon. From Milton to Wordsworth to the Modernists and beyond, improvisers displayed a taste for chaos. Yet however overtly rule-breaking their literary efforts, they always withdrew from swallowing total chaos whole. That about-face is enacted — invisibly — by improv’s exquisite formal achievement.
Laurence Sterne’s 18th century masterpiece Tristram Shandy insists that “This rhapsodical work,” is full of digressions that proceed insistently “out of all rule.” The narrator’s “inconsiderate [unconsidered] way of talking” is governed by “my pen” for “I govern not it.” Having written the first sentence of a chapter, he assures us, he “trust[s] to Almighty God for the second.” At one point he offers these scribbles as a description of his plot:
For some the novel is unfinished, incomplete at the time of Sterne’s death. But, for others the whole madcap, stream-of-consciousness novel, saturated in sexual innuendo, ends perfectly with a ridiculous and implausible “COCK and a BULL” story. The story is told by Pastor Yorick whose name reminds us that death haunts the novel.
Yorick’s tale is about a bull belonging to Tristram’s father. The bull is expected to service all the cows in the neighborhood. The question is whether he is equal to the task. Tristram’s mother asks what their story is all about. This is the final sentence: “A Cock and a Bull, said Yorick – And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard.”
Not only is Tristram Shandy free-wheeling but apparently pointless and with nothing to prove. And yet Sterne’s final cock and bull story is a perfect if 99% invisible summation of his book, so much so that Michael Winterbottom’s film adaptation first bore that name: A Cock and Bull Story. A film which is to its source what Adaptation is to The Orchid Thief — wild, loose, and, oddly, on the nail.
A Meticulously Prepared Art
As always that master of paradox Oscar Wilde offers the best gloss on the paradox before us: “spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art.” What Mars’s exploratory podcasts make perfectly clear is that that 99% invisibility is achieved by means of Thomas Edison’s definition of genius, that it is 99% perspiration. Which leaves room for only 1% inspiration.
Speaking to the LA Film School, Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of the advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather, confirms these proportions. He explains why creative people can be so annoying:
Well, there are several reasons, one of which is that they are procrastinators. Where the least talented architects would all start drawing things up on day one, and the most talented architects would do nothing. They commit nothing to paper other than doodles and what they're doing, because they're crazy, is they’re waiting to get lucky — they're waiting have inspiration. They know that something that's emotionally potent can come from a very trivial behavioral gesture.
There are aspects to people who are very linear and very kind of outcome-focused, who want to solve a problem, come up with the right answer, get up with a tic, and move onto question seventeen. Those people find the behavior of creative people maddeningly frustrating.
Linear people find Tristram Shandy maddeningly frustrating. It’s a challenge. Truth is, I only began to grok it on my second reading. But improvisers, always seeking to challenge the mainstream form of rationality, mean in fact, as it were, to madden us. They seek to knock Reason off its high horse.
Stately plump Buck Mulligan…
Who can read Joyce’s Ulysses’s streams of consciousness and not become more self-aware of the flow of thoughts that flit through our heads? We know we have entered a new literary universe from the first page of the American edition. The impulse to stretch reason — like this stretched S which perfectly emulates Mulligan’s stately plump belly with which the novel begins — is at the heart of the creative enterprise. It is the culture of spontaneity’s gift to civilization, the gift of innovation and renewal when rigidified system has set in. Every creative act is an effort to roll back the dominance of the purpose-driven rationality that is driving us now to the brink of extinction.
Knopf’s Ulysses was invisibly designed by Ernst Reichl, PhD, father of former Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl. According to Design Observer, Reichl “was a ‘whole book’ designer, believing in the harmonious totality of the package and the value of one design vision for all its parts.” Reichl’s Ulysses is a totally integrated signifier. Which is what Joyce’s novel is. Great literary design married with great typographical design.
Yeah, but Why?!?
With the help of recent bioevolutionary thinking and findings in neuroscience we can better understand what the point is of this mostly invisible attack on reason. Improvisation broadens rationality’s toolkit by metabolizing “lesser,” non-cognitive human faculties: instinct, intuition, and embodied emotion, like that evoked by Reichl’s sensuous capital S. For humankind to flourish, evolution means — if it means anything — for our two kinds of attention to work together. Left and right brain, now called Hot and Cold Cognition, should work together.
Improvisers are called to this enterprise of redefining rationality because Cold Cognition behaves dismissively to “lesser” faculties and cuts them off at the corpus collosum, the link between the hemispheres. Cold Cognition — Reason — determines when it wants to listen to embodied Hot Cognition — embodied emotion: those inklings we get from instinct and intuition.
In our technological society Reason rules the roost. Improv seeks to knock that cock right off. We like to think rational decisions shape our lives but, in fact, instincts, appetites, and accidents have an equal role. We may marry for prudential reasons, but lust or greed, or hopefully that most irrational emotion, love, is part of the story. Why marry him and not another? Yes, he’s attractive but who put him in your way on the street that day? Accident. What of that man who inhabits the next street but whom you haven’t met? Should you wait for another accident? Unthought, unspoken, unbodied desire — longing — will help you decide.
Antonio Damasio, head of the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC and a rock star among today’s neuroscientists, champions affect, the role of feeling and emotion he believes central in constituting, not just affecting, our cognitive life. An early campaigner for embodied mind, he believes cognitive science has leaned too far toward René Descartes’s mind-body duality. Descartes’s cogito ergo sum — I think therefore I am — not only separated mind from body but dismissed the body’s role in our mental life.
In his recent book, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018), Damasio explains not just the emergence of consciousness but also of life as we know it. He offers a grand vision of life from its start all along the way shaped by affect, the longing to flourish.
Human culture emerges from the same impulse — the imperative to maintain homeostasis, the balance that enables life to flourish — that drives all bio-evolution, from single, unnucleated cells up the evolutionary tree. It’s a moving and persuasive vision. And, like improvisation, it starts with spontaneity. Bio-evolution too is spontaneous, but scripted, invisible order within the disorder.
We think of human culture as the mind’s crowning glory. It was rational intellection we imagine — Pythagorean mathematics — that conceived the golden rectangle and built the Parthenon. But the golden ratios that underly the golden rectangle (1.618 …) are found in nature in the Fibonacci sequences visible in many organic forms from camellias to chambered nautiluses. In music it is the basis for Pythagorean harmonies.
DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man
The golden ratio underlies human sex appeal: the ratio of chest to waist to hips is subconsciously read by males as a sign of fecundity, and we shimmy on over there. Females register the appeal of a man’s shoulders that are 1.618 times his waist. Thus, the golden ratio could have been discovered by intellect or as a subconscious response to embodied experience. “I see it feelingly,” says Gloucester to Lear, two aristocrats, their entitlement and arrogance finally humbled. Chastened are we all if we listen to our bodies.
Maybe that longing you feel for that man or woman’s perfect ratios is the trivial behavioral gesture that inspires your next improvised masterpiece.
“Everything changes except the avant-garde”
So quipped French poet and polymath Paul Valéry. Ever making us modern, an avatar of the avant-garde, improvisation arises from the imbalance between Reason and embodied emotion. It seeks to return us to balanced living. It returns us to an equilibrium between the mind’s imagined objectivity and the body’s inescapable subjectivity, largely ignored even though it makes up 99% of our cognitive life. In improvisation, “unthought and unwilled desire” takes a poke at “intentionality, judgment, and self-consciousness” (Damasio, The Strange Order of Things, 33) that are perhaps the ultimate COCK AND BULL story. Hot Cognition melts Reason to proper size. A strange loop, indeed, by which culture advances, paradigm shift by paradigm shift, advancing by returning us to life’s starting point, spontaneous feeling.
Freedom from Reason’s constraints is the improviser’s royal road to transcendence. Improv’s effort to enrich our everyday rationality is 99% invisible because it is not presented as logical, rational argument. Improv is experiential, and the experience is transformative, alchemical. It makes gold out of doodles and trivial behavioral gestures.
Then Along Came Trump …
But sometimes all that improv’s challenge to reason brings is chaos. Not just a taste but full-blown, Hurricane-Katrina-level chaos. By design. As neo-liberals like to say, “a disaster is a terrible thing to waste.”
Trickster likes to stir up trouble. Dark Trickster Trump will stir up trouble he alone can fix. Just ask him. Creating trouble that needs fixing is essential to the autocrat’s COCK AND BULL story.
